Same way it is up to me how you use books you bought (kindle) or songs you bought (any streaming crap nowadays).

If you're shitty enough person (good businessman) you can profit off of anything.

In my experience in Canada from several years ago, the business teams in wireless telcos don't see it as providing you internet on device x. The ip connection on a device is a gateway towards a service, and the telecoms want to be providers of services, and the differentiator from competitors is having better and different services.

In my opinion the biggest fear of those business development teams is to be treated as or thought of just as providing internet on a device. As being just the pipe is not considered a lucrative market, and open to lots of competition where the race is to the bottom on price. This is also where you get lots of the anti-competitive behaviors, like not investing the effort to make a competitors service optimal within a network, as the carriers would rather launch their own service instead of making someone elses service they don't generate revenue off of work great.

To be fair, in the older gen access technologies, all internet access isn't equal. The access network was optimized for the usage patterns of a mobile browser, in the way it scheduled and idled the radio (I'm glossing over a large number of details). So connecting a computer via tethering that behaves differently and is far more chatty on the network, is actually a much costlier device to support. The current gen techs like LTE do operate much differently, to support chatty devices and apps. With a better optimized network and devices loaded with chatty apps, this difference is probably disappearing.

So if you put yourself in the shoes of a business dev person at a wireless carrier. They'll look at this and say, well we can have a $40 plan for just internet access. Or we can have a $35 plan for just mobile browsing, since that's more efficient and allows us to be more competitive when using the phones browser, and a $15 add on for tethering for those who want it and cost the company more. There are entire teams dedicated to just figuring this stuff out.

And this leads to some of the stuff I would get thrown from time to time, like the $60k bills (no longer allowed in canada, a rule was created to prevent surprise bills, but used to be a thing) when someone bought unlimited mobile browser for $7, and thought that meant unlimited usage for their tethered computer and started torrenting all day which was pay per use.

An unlimited $7 plan only works in the context of the way a user can use a mobile browser, and that's why the carriers think they can dictate how you use the internet connection. They have departments to tailor make plans that only work if they're able to dictate how the internet is used.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this model, I'm just trying to explain where I believe this perspective comes from based on my experience. I've been out of the industry several years now, and my opinions are my own.

Above what the sibling said regarding branding and pre-installed crap-ware, they still make a distinction between "on device" use and "modem use".

Source: read the fine print on an offer from my provider, Bouygues Telecom.

My regular plan has 40 GB, which I can use on the phone or tethered. This summer I was spending a lot of time at my parent's and their land internet connection was spotty. At the same time, Bouygues ran a campaign where I could get an extra 20 GB for next to nothing, so I was considering that. Read the fine print which basically said "the allowance doesn't apply to tethered use". I didn't care enough to challenge them on this so I passed.

Edit: Just checked the available options, this is still the case. Can't give a direct link for some reason, so here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/rQgoz0m

Basically this is an option for "unlimited internet on the weekends". The originally hidden disclaimer says, among other things, "except for modem mode".

That's not true. Based in Germany, my mom still had, and I believe still has, a SIM in her phone that doesn't support tethering.

They did have a say, before iPhone and Android happened, devices have been branded, sim-locked, locked down etc by the carriers. I think they mostly stopped doing that in recent years.

They can put default APN configurations in the SIM card that (by default) would have different fares for mobile usage and tethered/hotspot usage. They cannot block you from changing the configuration, but I think in theory they could terminate the contract if you did so. In practice 99% people got used to buying both a "computer SIM" (which is typically sold with a cheap Huawei USB modem) and a "phone SIM", so the providers that do differentiate that way don't bother going after violations.

> In Europe carriers never had any say about what functionality a mobile device offered.

Not so, unfortunately. I tried putting a phone SIM into an iPad, and soon got a message from the mobile company saying the SIM card wasn’t intended for this use and would be disabled until it went back into a phone.

(This was in the UK a few years ago with a Three PAYG SIM).

> In Europe carriers never had any say about what functionality a mobile device offered.

not really. a few years ago, before the eu roaming was made cheap, i bought a sim from wind operator in italy, and it was blocking my tethered traffic. i had to "fix" my ttl for it to work

Who do you think Ericsson and Nokia talked to when they planed their extensive and differentiated portfolio?

In the US tethering is fundamentally different (or at least the carriers want you to think that so they can upcharge it)

Yes, it is the networks that demand extra payment for tethering. That is still a thing in the US; you have to pay extra for a plan that includes tethering.